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“Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.”
― Philip K. Dick

“If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Oh, and I certainly don't suffer from schizophrenia. I quite enjoy it. And so do I.”
― Emilie Autumn

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”
― Joseph Campbell, Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research

“Sometimes I think people take reality for granted.”
― Francesca Zappia, Made You Up

“I didn't realize there was a ranking." I said. "Sadie frowned. "What do you mean?" "A ranking," I said. "You know, what's crazier than what." "Oh, sure there is," Sadie said. She sat back in her chair. "First you have your generic depressives. They're a dime a dozen and usually pretty boring. Then you've got the bulimics and the anorexics. They're slightly more interesting, although usually they're just girls with nothing better to do. Then you start getting into the good stuff: the arsonists, the schizophrenics, the manic-depressives. You can never quite tell what those will do. And then you've got the junkies. They're completely tragic, because chances are they're just going to go right back on the stuff when they're out of here." "So junkies are at the top of the crazy chain," I said. Sadie shook her head. "Uh-uh," she said. "Suicides are." I looked at her. "Why?" "Anyone can be crazy," she answered. "That's usually just because there's something screwed up in your wiring, you know? But suicide is a whole different thing. I mean, how much do you have to hate yourself to want to just wipe yourself out?”
― Michael Thomas Ford

“I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Believing something existed and then finding out it didn't was like reaching the top of the stairs and thinking there was one more step.”
― Francesca Zappia, Made You Up

“We wait and think and doubt and hate. How does it make you feel? The overwhelming feeling is rage. We hate ourself for being unable to be other than what we are. Unable to be better. We feel rage. The feelings must be followed. It doesn't matter whether you're an ideologue or a sensualist, you follow the stimuli thinking that they're your signposts to the promised land. But they are nothing of the kind. What they are is rocks to navigate the past, each on your brush against, ripping you a little more open and they are always more on the horizon. But you can't face up to the that, so you force yourself to believe the bullshit of those you instinctively know are liars and you repeat those lies to yourself and to others, hoping that by repeating them often and fervently enough you'll attain the godlike status we accord those who tell the lies most frequently and most passionately. But you never do, and even if you could, you wouldn't value it, you'd realise that nobody believes in heroes any more. We know that they only want to sell us something we don't really want and keep from us what we really do need. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe we're getting in touch with our condition at last. It's horrible how we always die alone, but no worse than living alone.”
― Irvine Welsh, Filth

“Knowing that you're crazy doesn't make the crazy things stop happening.”
― Mark Vonnegut, The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

“I didn't have the luxury of taking reality for granted. And I wouldn't say I hated people who did, because that's just about everyone. I didn't hate them. They didn't live in my world.

But that never stopped me from wishing I lived in theirs.”
― Francesca Zappia, Made You Up

“In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.”
― Kevin Alan Lee, The Split Mind: Schizophrenia from an Insider's Point of View

“Am I a mindless fool? My life is a fragment, a disconnected dream that has no continuity. I am so tired of senselessness. I am tired of the music that my feelings sing, the dream music.”
― Ross David Burke, When the Music's Over: My Journey into Schizophrenia

“My dad once told me life would get complicated when I grew up. I’m guessing this isn’t what he meant. My mom, on the other hand, agreed with him, and I’m guessing this kind of thing is exactly what she meant.”
― Susan Ee, World After

“Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.”
― R.D. Laing

“The only thing you have for measuring what's real is your mind . . . so what happens when your mind becomes a pathological liar?”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“My good fortune is not that I've recovered from mental illness. I have not, nor will I ever. My good fortune lies in having found my life.”
― Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

“The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.”
― Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By

“I keep moving ahead, as always, knowing deep down inside that I am a good person and that I am worthy of a good life.”
― Jonathan Harnisch

“We children of schizophrenics are the great secret keepers, the ones who don't want you to think that anything is wrong.”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“You know... the thing that is so wrong about being mentally ill is the terrible price you have to pay for survival.”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“What we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.”
― R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise

“You can’t be beaten by something you laugh at.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Freak

“The drug I take is called schizophrenia, among other labels, which I desperately want to put away. I want to put the drug of schizophrenia down, and I want to put down the stigma surrounding its label.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Second Alibi: The Banality of Life

“There’s a tremendous need to implode the myths of mental illness, to put a face on it, to show people that a diagnosis does not have to lead to a painful and oblique life....We who struggle with these disorders can lead full, happy, productive lives, if we have the right resources.”
― Elyn R. Saks

“It’s more than that now. I can’t tell the difference between what’s part of me and what’s not.”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“I should already know that my thoughts are never alone.”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“The Japanese psychiatrist Kimura Bin, director of the Psychiatric Hos- pital of Kyoto and translator of Binswanger, sought to deepen Heidegger’s anal- ysis of temporality in Being and Time with reference to a classification of the fundamental types of mental illness. To this end he made use of the Latin for- mula post festum (literally, “after the celebrationâ€�), which indicates an irreparable past, an arrival at things that are already done. Post festum is symmetrically dis- tinguished from ante festum (“before the celebrationâ€�) and intra festum (“during the celebrationâ€�).
Post festum temporality is that of the melancholic, who always experiences his own “I� in the form of an “I was,� of an irrecoverably accomplished past with respect to which one can only be in debt. This experience of time corresponds in Heidegger to Dasein’s Being-thrown, its finding itself always already abandoned to a factual situation beyond which it can never venture. There is thus a kind of constitutive “melancholy� of human Dasein, which is always late with respect to itself, having always already missed its “celebration.�
Ante festum temporality corresponds to the experience of the schizophrenic, in which the direction of the melancholic’s orientation toward the past is in- verted. For the schizophrenic, the “Iâ€� is never a certain possession; it is always something to be attained, and the schizophrenic therefore always lives time in the form of anticipation. “The ‘Iâ€� of the schizophrenic,â€� Kimura Bin writes, “is not the ‘Iâ€� of the ‘already beenâ€�; it is not tied to a duty. In other words, it is not the post festum ‘Iâ€� of the melancholic, which can only be spoken of in terms of a past and a debt. . . . Instead, the essential point here is the problem of one’s own possibility of being oneself, the problem of the certainty of becoming oneself and, therefore, the risk of possibly being alienated from oneselfâ€� (Kimura Bin 1992: 79). In Being and Time, the schizophrenic’s temporality corresponds to the primacy of the future in the form of projection and anticipation. Precisely because its experience of time originally temporalizes itself on the basis of the future, Dasein can be defined by Heidegger as “the being for whom, in its very Being, Being is always at issueâ€� and also as “in its Being always already anticipat- ing itself.â€� But precisely for this reason, Dasein is constitutively schizophrenic; it always risks missing itself and not being present at its own “celebration.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“There’s this ache in me—a sweet, maddening ache—because I haven’t even touched you, and yet I already crave a lifetime of your presence. It’s like my soul remembered you before my body ever had the chance. I don’t just want to be near youâ€� I want to belong to the world we create together.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia

“I might live in chaos, but love still anchors me.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia